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3/11/2014

Five Star Shorts

Ouat Media Presents: Five Acclaimed Short Films

(Various,75 min.)

If recent award season completism gave you a newfound
appreciation for short films, there’s a new package of shorts worth viewing.
“Five Acclaimed Short Films” offers a quintet of international shorts that are
worth raving about. This package takes viewers on a trip around the globe and features
a handful of festival favourites that offer everything from scathing comedy to
searing drama.

Up first in the selection is A Pretty Funny Story
(Canada, 19 min.), which screened at the 2012 Toronto International Film
Festival and won the Canal + Award for Best International Short Film at the
2013 Clermont Ferrand International Film Festival. A Pretty Funny Story comes from up-and-coming filmmaker Evan Morgan
and readers might recall the name thanks to Morgan’s breakout hit The Dirties, for which he served as
co-writer/producer/editor. This short offering gives another sample from the
impressive body of work of this emerging talent. A Pretty Funny Story, like The
Dirties, is black comedy at its finest. It begins as a familiar domestic
farce when Rick (Justin Skye Conley) spies his neighbour (Jimi Shlag) doing an
awkward funny dance in front of the window. Rick calls his wife (Erin Hicock)
to join him for a giggle, but their unneighbourly voyeurism gets the better of
them when the neighbour realizes his jig is the butt of a joke.

A Pretty Funny Story

Nothing is more fun than spying on the neighbours—especially
in cold, snowed-in Canada—but teasing turns to terror as drastic reprisals
ensue and Rick, Brenda, and their son Michael (Ezra Sherman) find themselves
victims of a wickedly funny revenge plot. Rick, placed in the absurdly
hilarious peril of holding a juicy anecdote in one hand and his son’s fate in
the other, must watch his words carefully lest he trigger the wrath of the
cartoonishly evil neighbour. Morgan’s hand at dark, twisted comedy takes the
domestic drama of A Pretty Funny Story
to unexpected places as the banality of family life gets a hairline fracture of
absurdity. A Pretty Funny Story
becomes increasingly preposterous while the family plays nice with the
neighbour, yet the laughs rise until the film’s riotously bonkers finale. This
laugh-out-loud funny short gets the programme off to a great start.

The line-up changes gears to offer the dramatic short 37º4
S (France, 12 min.) and whisks viewers from the suburban malaise of
humdrum Canada to the picturesque island of Tristan da Cunha. Tristan da Cunha,
located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, has a population of only 270
people; however, as the narrator, Nick (Riaan Ripetto), explains, the island
will be short one of its most valuable residents when his long-time lover
reveals that she is moving to London. Shot in a sweepingly contemplative
fashion by writer/director Adriano Valerio, 37º4
S follows Nick as he reflects upon his relationship and takes in the sights
of the island that has defined his relationship with Anne. The striking
cinematography by Valerio and Loran Bonnardot is stark yet arresting as it
captures the arresting scenery of the island with a tinge of elegiac
dreaminess.

The fog that lingers over the mountains and blends with the
island’s grey sky shrouds Nick’s tale in a melancholy atmosphere while the
crashing waves at the seaside convey anger and misery. 37º4 S evokes comparison to Andrea Arnold’s windswept Wuthering Heights and its sumptuous
cinematography by Robbie Ryan as Valerio’s camera follows Nick around the
island and takes in the sights of the evocative landscape. The immediacy of the
handheld camerawork is freeing while the natural elements of the island
beautifully shape Nick’s state of mind. It’s a sombre story, but Valerio’s
camera brings it to life with an electrifying sense of freedom: 37º4 S is a moving ode to lost love.

Just Before Losing Everything

The centrepiece of this selection of international shorts,
though, is easily the riveting Just Before Losing Everything / Avant que de tout perdre(France, 29
min.), which I reviewed as part of the Oscar Live Shorts programme and dubbed
“nothing short of a masterpiece.” This flawless film by Xavier Legrand should
have taken home the gold on Oscar night, and it’s an excellent film regardless.
Legrand thrusts the viewers into a delicate family drama as a mother (a
phenomenal Léa Drucker) tries to extricate herself and her children from an
abusive environment. Taut and paced with precise meticulousness, Just Before Losing Everyone wastes not a
second of its near-thirty-minute running time after hooking the viewer with the
opening frame. The film deftly illustrates a realistic scenario of domestic
violence through its dexterous screenplay that navigates both the awkwardness
and the intangible elusiveness with which people confront abuse. It’s a film
that improves upon repeat viewings even though it’s perfect the first time
around.

Domestic troubles of a different kind appear in the
light-hearted comedy The Date (Finland, 7 min.), which
provides welcome relief after the mesmerizing breathlessness of Just Before Losing Everything. The Date
is a playful dance of innuendo and double-entendre,
so it’s a remarkable follow-up to Just
Before Losing Everything as one watches back-to-back films strike dramatic
and comedic notes, respectively, by approaching their subjects with such
subtlety. Tino (Oskari Joutsen) puts the prowess of his family’s feline stud
Diablo to the test when he agrees to let Mirka (Anna Paavilainen), a young
female friend of the family, bring her female kitty to breed. Tino’s manliness
is up for scrutiny, too, as he serves Mirka and her mother coffee and cookies
(with neatly folded napkins) and coaxes Mirka’s fears about their cats’
coupling. Mirka’s cat, see, is having her first time, so Tino explains above
all the growling and hissing coming from the other room how Diablo will be kind
and gentle. (That’s how he developed his way with the ladies!) Writer/director
Jenni Toivoniemi balances this amusingly awkward scenario with both heart and
humour. The Date is just as sweet as
it is funny, and the lo-fi minimalism of the affair adds to the quirky
character… catcalls and all.

The final film of the programme is the shortest, but The
Captain(Australia, 5 min.) is powerful for its malleable brevity. Directors
Nash Edgerton (who made the terrific Aussie thriller The Square) & Spencer Susser (Hesher)introduce a
startling (an impressively realized) crash site where a lone survivor stumbles
around the ruins of an airplane. The film offers neither context nor words to
explain the wreckage through which the survivor sifts. This effective film is
an impressive feat of production design and visual effects, and an even greater
coup for economical storytelling. The quick finale of The Captain has an effective openness that invites viewers to
create the rest of the story and explain for themselves the story of the lone
survivor.

The “Five Acclaimed
Short Films” package is available on iTunes from Ouat Media.